REALITY CHECK: MORE AMERICANS ARE “RETHINKING” 9/11?

Did you know that a 3rd building fell on 9-11? That bill board is today over Times Square. It was placed there through donations to a campaign called Rethink 9/11.

In fact, that group has placed posters and signs across the world, from Australia, to Canada, from San Francisco to right here in New York City.

So what is Rethink 9/11? Wouldn’t only a fringe group of people would still question 9/11? Perhaps not, because today we will tell you about new polling that shows a majority of those polled either question the official 9/11 story or don’t believe it at all. Is that possible?

The first step toward truth, is to be informed.

Here in New York City, today at the site of the 9/11 Memorial, promises to never forget what happened the morning of September 11th, 2001. But never forgetting doesn’t mean that you don’t rethink what you have been told.

Rethink 911 is the first ever global 9/11 anniversary campaign. Sponsored by a coalition of more than 40 organizations, ReThink911 is placing ads in 11 major cities around the world this September 2013.

But what is there to rethink? According to a group called Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, you need to start by rethinking the third building that fell that day.

Building 7, behind me. That rectangular building is the new building 7. It stands a little smaller but in the same place where the original World Trade Center 7 once stood.

To be fair, the collapse of building 7 has long been the claims of conspiracy theorists. In 2008, the National Institute of Standards and Technology or (NIST) released its long-awaited report on the collapse of World Trade Center 7. The lead investigator Shyam Sunder told journalists, “WTC 7 collapsed because of fires fueled by office furnishings. It did not collapse from explosives or from diesel fuel fires.”

But that claim has been taken on by that rapidly growing group known as Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Today, more than 2,000 progressional architects and engineers from around the world have joined together to say that the NIST claim that Building 7 came down because of office fires is not only untrue, it is not possible. That no skyscraper in history has ever come down that way.

That the way Building 7 fell was without the building tipping or rocking and that in order to fall like this, a building could only come down IF all the internal columns supporting building were to give way at the same time.

Enginneering is a technical field but most of us would know this as a controlled demolition.

To better understand the claims of AE for 9/11 Truth, I talked with Tony Szamboti, a mechanical design engineer with 27 years of experience in the aerospace and communications industries and one of the 2,000 engineers calling for an a new, independent investigation of the collapse of Building 7 and the World Trade Center towers.

Swann: “So you look at this image of the building falling, again NIST says that its office fires that have caused this. You say.. ‘give me another example?’”

Szamboti: “There is no other example.”

Swann: “No other example in the world?”

Szamboti: “They have no other example,”
Swann: “So this has never happened? This would be the first building in the world to come down this way?”

Szamboti: “And they say that. They say that thermal expansion caused it. What I say caused it and you can cut this out or leave it in, but I think they took out the core columns for 8 full stories, and that pulled in the exterior. When you have controlled demotion, and when take the core out, you pull in exterior and it comes down. When you take out 8 stories it all comes in.”

Swann: “What happens if you leave half of them? If it is not a controlled demolition and you have a failure of some columns?”

Szamboti: “Then you have a partial collapse.”

And there is another issue of how NIST says Building 7 came down. The say it was normal office fires. The technical explanation is that floor beams expanded because of heat and ultimately pushed a single column, column 79 off of its seating. That, NIST says, caused the entire collapse of the building. But what NIST told the public in 2008 was the reason these columns were pushed loose is because they were unrestrained.

What was discovered last year in 2012 after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request was granted, that claim was not true, that the columns were not unrestrained. In fact there were 3,896 shear studs holding those columns in place.

Szamboti: “One is, the beams could not expand far enough and if they could expand enough, those stiffeners would stop that girder from falling off. They were bonded.”

Swann: “But for the person that say, so you have so disagreements on some technical things.”

Szamboti: “No, no, its much more than that, it can’t happen to start. It would be sorta like me saying, I can put something thats a half inch wide and if i push it a half inch it will fall off this rail and thats not true. Thats what they’re saying, its that simple.”

There is something else Tony is passionate about. The claim by NIST in 2008 was that not only that building 7 came down as as the result of office fires but that the north tower fell down because of something called “deceleration”. Simply put, when you use a hammer to strike a nail, the force used does two things, it drives the nail downward but a certain moment pushes the hammer upward.

When you watch the video of the north tower coming down, Tony says there is no moment of impact where the burning top of the tower creates impact against the rest of building. Instead it all just free falls. Without that impact, the top of the tower could not have cause the rest of the building to collapse.

Szamboti: “What a legitimate investigation would have done would be to have interrogated anyone who had access to those interiors. I’m not talking about office people, (I’m talking about) security people, contractors, those types of people. That has never been done, that has never been done. I think our government is responsible to do that but we would want it to be above board. I don’t think the investigations we have had so far have been above board.”

So that is the professional challenge to the official story. Only a controlled demolition could have brought the building down and again, during the government investigation the evidence of explosive materials or a demolition was ruled out, not because the evidence didn’t exist, but because the inspectors didn’t bother to look for it.

How do families of 9/11 victims feel about this? Are they insulted by this campaign? Some may be but others are the ones supporting it.

Bob McIlvaine lost his son on 9/11.

McIlvaine: “Bobbie had just started Merrill Lynch two or three weeks before 9/11. Bobbie was VP of media relations, he was going to be writer and he was writing for a PR firm and their only client was Merrill Lynch and they loved his writing so much that they hired him. That day Merrill Lynch was holding a training on the 106 floor of the north tower. No one was able to get a hold of Bobbie. The tower was hit. We weren’t that worried because we knew he worked at Merrill Lynch. 150 people called him that morning. No one ever got a response.”

Swann: “But if he worked at Merrill Lynch why was he in the north tower?”

McIlvaine: “Well, this is what we are guessing because Merrill Lynch was sponsoring a seminar on the 106 floor that day.”

For Bob the most shocking thing about his son’s death, unlike most 9/11 families, Bob was able to recover parts of his son for burial and he actually received a cause of death from the coroner.

McIlvaine: “I got up to the morgue, talked to the doctor who examined him. He gave me the pictures, he asked me if I wanted to see the actual pictures and i didn’t want to see it. I felt bad about it. But no matter how you look at it, he got hit by a sudden force. He was impacted by something, yeah, a force, the top of his head was taken out. His right arm was blown off and his body had lacerations. If he had been on the 106 floor, we would have heard from him because a lot of people would have been calling out on the 106 floor.

But part of that autopsy reveled that Bobbie was not killed by being burned. In fact, the burns he received came after he had died.

McIlvaine: “So post-mortum means that he had burns after he died. I can say with confidence that Bobbie died, and I can say with confidence before the planes hit. So the point is, the planes had nothing to do with his death and I could prove that in a court of law pretty easily. And therefore if the planes had nothing to with his death, who killed him?”

The claims being made by Bob and Tony are compelling but the question we must ask, where is the American public on this issue? A newly commissioned poll on this very subject finds that 12 years after the 9/11 attacks, there is growing skepticism in the public.

According to that poll, 38% of Americans have doubts about the official account of 9/11 and 10% do not believe it at all. That is compared to only a minority of those polled, 40% who are completely satisfied.

But there is more. Because when you start asking questions about Building 7, the public is even more skeptical. 46% suspect or are sure it was controlled demolition, compared to 28% who say it was fires (the official story), and 27% who don’t know. And of those polled, the largest group, 41% support a new investigation of Building 7′s collapse, compared to 22% who opposed.

What you need to know, is that the idea that we rethink 9/11 some would call unpatriotic, others would call conspiratorial, but increasingly, those folks are now in the minority.

How far we come in 12 years.

But regardless of how you feel about this campaign, rethinking 9/11 is about more than just what happened in 2001. Over the last 12 years, we have watched just about every single constitutional liberty afforded to Americans taken away as a result of our “war on terror”. We have watched our government take away our right to speech, due process, freedom from search and seizure, the right to privacy of you person or papers, all taken away in the name of security. We can argue about whether that quest for security has made us more secure but what is beyond argument is that we are certainly less free. Despite all the rights that have been taken away, at least one right that still remains… the right to question who took those rights, how and why.